Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I have a necklace that A gave me, one he picked up in Kenya several years before we met.  He told me at the time that he must have been saving it for me.  It is made of black and brown wooden beads, with a large terra cotta bead in the middle, and 2 carved soapstone animals on either side.  There is one in a perfect necklace-fiddling location that is a rhinoceros, and his horn is carved flat on top in a way that invites my fingers to slide along the cool smoothness of the stone.

When I’d wear the necklace, I’d let A know, and he was always pleased to know that I actually wore it.  I’d tease him that I was "fondling the rhinos on my chest," which of course quickly became an allusion to a different and altogether naughtier activity than the actual reality.

I wore that necklace many times when he was alive, and no one ever said a word about it.  I recently started wearing it again, because I had outfits it would go with.  (A rustic African necklace with carved animals doesn’t go with everything.)  And every time I do, I get tons of compliments on it, at work, in shops, last night at the coffee house.  Which is strange to me, because it never elicited any response before; it’s only since he passed that it has.

I actually like it.  If people ask about it, I say it’s from Kenya, or I say "it was a gift from a friend," and leave it at that.  But I wonder if it has some kind of special energy to it now that makes it more noticeable; I know it always has for me, and now I tend to wear it when I need to feel a little closer to him.

If nothing else, I like it because every time they notice it, whether they realize it or not, it validates that he was here. That he touched that necklace, brought it home from another continent, and gave it to me.  Someone besides me is acknowledging that he was here.  He was here.

I got an e-mail from my cousin the other day.  Her father-in-law was in critical condition for complications after scheduled heart surgery.  Last I heard, he was improving, but not out of the woods yet.  He’s already had a stroke in recent years.  Turns out, he has some kind of congenital heart defect that complicates matters further, so all the kids in his family have also been tested as the result of his turn for the worse. 

My cousin’s husband does not have the congenital defect; however, they discovered plaque in his arteries.

He’s 35 years old.

My mother tells me that (in her work) she generally sees this in men in their 50s, not men in their thirties.  My cousin-in-law is ridiculously in shape, as is his wife.  They eat right.  They take all these vitamins and supplements.  I’m not entirely sure they could scrape up an ounce of fat between them.  So clearly, the heart disease is genetic in this family.  And now my cousin-in-law will no doubt be adding other medicines to his daily batch of vitamins to try to keep him from ending up in an ICU just like his father.  And my cousin will have to worry about him, and their child.

It was their wedding I went to, and cried through, a month after A died.  When they started their vows and talked about forever, I bit my lip and stared off into Lake Superior to my left as the tears rolled down my face, and prayed they would both be 99 years old before they learned that "forever" is sometimes much shorter time than you ever imagined.

And now I learn that he is stalked by the same genetic time bomb that took my A, and A’s father, and A’s father’s father.   After A died, his siblings were tested, and despite both of them being hard-core runners and fitness buffs, they, too, have problems developing along the same lines.  But at least they know; at least they have been warned, and can try to do something about it.  I hate it, for A, for his family, for my cousins.  And I know that there’s very little to be done about it.   It’s like a thief in your house that you can see through the windows, but you can’t stop him as he takes what is most valuable from you.  The best you can do is slow him down.

Native to this beautiful desert I live in is the prickly pear cactus.  There is a large one in my front yard separating the neighbor’s driveway from my own.  If you look at a prickly pear, you will see large spines sticking out menacingly from the pores of the pad, and it seems a simple enough thing to avoid them.  But what you don’t see is that at the base of those large and dangerous-looking spikes is a bed of tiny, hairlike spines that are invisible from anything but close range, and for those unacquainted with this desert plant, maybe not even then. 

More often than not, these are the ones that will get you, because you need only brush them to end up with a hand full of them.  Or something else; I’ve seen them sticking out of my leather tennis shoes and a green plastic garden hose I misguidedly pulled past one.

They are nearly impossible to see, and often you don’t know that they are there until you touch your hand to something just so and are rewarded with a zinging pain.  The filaments of these spines are like fiberglass; they work their way into and under your skin and stay there, impervious to all attempts at removal.  If you can see them sticking out, you can try a tweezers, but the spines are brittle and are as likely to break as be removed.  You can try letting white glue dry on the unfortunate hand, and sometimes you can peel them off with the glue.  Sometimes slowly rubbing across the spines with duct tape will pull them out, but only if you’re going the right direction; if not, you can end up helping them deeper into your skin. 

Sometimes you’re just stuck with them, and you have to put up with them until they work themselves out via the normal shedding of your skin.  Half the time, they won’t hurt at all.  Usually, you have to hit them just right, and then it’s a doozy.  And you want to just be rid of them as soon as possible, but the spines will take their own time leaving your flesh.

I’m not sure why, today, the prickly pear suggested itself to me.  But last night, in the dark, after I’d put away the book I’ve been distracting myself with, I was flooded with memories of A.  I do not often think of the trauma of those days after he died and before I knew it.  There is no need; it was a horrible time, and he had already gone.  Anyway, it is the sweetest memories that make me cry now.

That first kiss in the airport, brief and tentative, like I was kissing a relative.  And the second one, the real thing, that put jelly in my knees that returns even with the memory of that kiss and all those we shared thereafter.  The memory of the way his hands moved on his guitar, like liquid, like he had no bones.  The memory of the way his hands moved on me, like fire, like I had no bones.  The memories came one after another; I have no trouble remembering the good times.  Those are the ones that make me weep the most.  Those are the ones that had the tears rolling down my face into the pillow I hugged tightly as I remembered holding him.  I cry because it was so good to be "us," together.  I cry because memories are all I have now.

I don’t know why those memories came last night, so clear and palpable, so dangerous.  Most of the time, they don’t hurt at all.  But you hit it just right, and it’s a doozy.

When I finished lunch Tuesday, I checked my phone and saw that someone had left a message for me, but no number had shown up, probably because the phone was out of juice when the call came in and it went directly to voice mail. It was the Women’s Diagnostic Center regarding my 2nd follow-up ultrasound (in regards to my cyst saga), wanting to reschedule. But it took me forever to get to the message because of all the messages I have saved, lest the people who left them die. That’s exceedingly blunt, but that, in fact, is the reason I have them. I am consciously and actively collecting mementos in advance, unwilling to get caught out again and entertaining the delusion that somehow I can make it better for myself the inevitable next time.

The first old message of the bunch is one left by A’s best friend a week before the first-year milestone of his passing, so it’s a little more than a year old. I’ve kept it, trying to hold on to people who were connected to him, people who were content to let me go. Every time I have to resave it and hear his voice, it’s a tiny knife in my heart.  I never expected their friendship, but accepted it gratefully when it was offered, which left me hurt when it evaporated. We no longer have any communication, nor any connection; none but the one in my heart that will never entirely let them go, but will give up all hope and fantasy to anything beyond that. I am a practical woman, after all.

I realized that there was no comfort in holding on to that message anymore; in fact, it pains me to hear it. And I’m a big believer in (eventually) not doing things you know are going to hurt. And I was annoyed at having to wade through the saved messages to get to the new ones. So I deleted the message that I have dutifully resaved every 21 days for the last 400 or so. I actually felt more relief than loss in doing so. And then I deleted the one from my mother, and my father, and my brother, and my friend. I only kept two: one from E, and one from my friend’s mother, in case some day she might need it. But my family will call again, and I can save those, or not. I don’t know.

Try as you might, you just can’t box people and preserve them exactly as they are. They are wholly unlike summer peaches that you can put up on a shelf for some dry, cold winter night when you need a taste of something that reminds you that the world is good and beautiful. I find that the focus, the desperation that makes me want to try, creates its own grief that is subtle, but constant. I am waiting for the whole world, (or my whole world anyway), to die, bracing myself against what I know to be inescapable, what I have experienced, coming far sooner than I ever dreamed. It’s a bunker mentality of a sort. I travel this world warily, touched constantly by the melancholy of having made the intimate acquaintance of mortality.

I’ve heard it said that we cannot live fully with the spectre of death constantly in mind, which is why we all learn to carefully avoid it as much as possible, and why we are so completely unprepared when it comes into our lives. I know it’s true, because I am hyperaware of it now, and it dogs me, my own shadow a shade of things to come, and things to pass.

I want my innocence back, damn it!  I am haunted, and hunted, by what I know now.

But I deleted those messages. Perhaps that is a small victory. Perhaps there is hope for me yet. Perhaps there is hope.

My A was a thinker.  You could always see the wheels turning behind his eyes; he never stopped thinking, not for a moment.  It made him one of the most intelligent and interesting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, but it also made it hard for him to really relax.  One of my favorite pictures of him is a pair of screenshots I took while we were chatting, and he is making his “thinking face.”  It is one that anyone who knew him would instantly recognize, but it was not among the pictures I shared with his family and friends.  That one was just for me.  It is so quintessentially him.

A had beautiful hazel eyes.  I, too, have hazel eyes, and it was yet another “coincidence” connecting us that we marveled at, among so many other uncanny similarities.  My hazel eyes are green-brown, but his were a gorgeous green-blue that I loved to look into so deeply that eventually he’d laugh nervously, and bashfully look away.   I commented on them from time to time, and he once told me that he loved that I noticed his eyes.  Apparently, any previous feminine attention he’d received had overlooked them, though I don’t know how.   They sparkled like jewels.

The first time I met his sister, I was startled to see she had the same unusual green-blue eyes.  It is more than a little disconcerting to be looking again into eyes you know are closed forever, the eyes you loved in someone else’s face and not theirs at all, but so close, your heart aches.